#Spanner R5 #amediting Update: "Enter the Monkeywrench" Final Chapter Lineup, Part 1

As of today, all the chapters in Enter the Monkeywrench Part 1 now have their final titles:

Intro
Interlude 0: The Monkeywrench Cometh
0. First Blast of the Trumpet
1. On the 13th Floor
2. Red Skies in Morning
3. Angel of Chaos
4. Your Mission, if You Choose to Accept It
5. Herald of the Coming Race
6. The Man with the Plan
7. The Pattern Emerges
8. Storming the Temple
9. The Fuses Have Been Lit

These chapters are the ones that will be in the Part 1 ebook. Now that I'm planning on an initial five-part serial release for Enter the Monkeywrench, I'm ending not just the book but every section with a cliffhanger, partly in homage to the old movie serials I loved as a kid and the serial novels that ran in the science-fiction magazines during the same era.

Interestingly enough, I also have the final chapter lineup for Part 5:

Interlude 4: City on the Edge of a Dream
37. The Empty City
38. Meet the New God
39. The Secret Meeting
40. Into the Underworld
Interlude 5: You Have Lost the Game
41. Stalking the Rotten Apple
42. Prepare for Ascension
43. True Sacrifices
44. Spanner in the Works
Interlude 6: The Virus Has Been Spread

Finally, I have the final Interlude lineup for the complete book:

0. The Monkeywrench Cometh (formerly 6)
1. The Top Five
2. The X Factor
3. The Coming of the New Flesh
4. City on the Edge of a Dream (formerly 9)
5. You Have Lost the Game (formerly 8)
6. The Virus Has Been Spread (formerly 1 "Rocket Ready")

Out of Book 1, I currently have the Intro and Chapters 0-4 and 7 complete. I'm currently working on Chapter 9; I'm writing most of it from scratch. After that, I'll give Chapter 8 the few edits it needs and a new ending that's a cliffhanger in itself. I should be able to finish them both tonight. Soon I'll have something I can at least release to beta readers. It's coming, sooner or later...

#Spanner R5 #amediting update: 9 (But Really 12) Chapters for the Serial Novel's Part 1; or, Some Rough Plotting

I've finally settled on the number of chapters in Enter the Monkeywrench part 1 (9, not counting the 3 chapters numbered "0") and their final order. Now complete: the Intro and Chapters 0 and 1.

I switched the order of Chapters 2 and 3. In Chapter 2, we find out the violet-eyed girl (Leila in earlier revisions and later volumes) not only is scheduled to be sacrificed in order to turn a dead man into a god, but actually wants to be; and I realize, I need to evoke a feeling of dread. Chapter 3 is where we see the vision driving the COPCO Crime Prevention Division's precogs mad; in a new ending, we'll find out that the sacrificial priestess who intends to sacrifice the violet-eyed girl just happens to be the division president, and even the company CEO is afraid of her. I think this order works better.

Chapter 4: Shira, chief "troubleshooter" for the Wilder Foundation, gets her mission from the Foundation chairman (Thurston), meanwhile fending off African witch hunters as only a level-4 Charmer can.

Chapter 5: the series' major antagonists panic. Chapter 6 is the section "The Man with the Plan" from the old Chapter 1, expanded and revised; sure enough, a plan is involved, to deal with not only the "angel of chaos" killing the precogs but Shira too.

Chapter 7: Shira, Thurston, and the blond girl (Jennifer) have to explain a few things to the others. They hammer out some rough preliminary plans and do a few experiments. And they prevent an attack by the left-wing terrorists of the Socialist Revolutionary Organization — including Shira's "squib" half-sister Talia.

Chapter 8: The first phase of the villains' plan is set into motion.

Chapter 9: And Shira and company fend it off in what should be spectacular fashion. And Shira takes the mission. End of Part 1.

There's my own rough plan. I'll be deleting some scenes, writing some new ones, even importing one from Chapter 2 R4. After that, I'll smooth the continuity so everything leads to the cliffhanger ending.

Speaking of the cliffhanger, I added one new scene to the end. Will Becket, the vampire super soldier who sank his fangs into Osama bin Laden's neck (and the series' Char Aznable figure), makes his first ominous appearance in the story. And all he says is, "It has begun."

#Spanner R5 #amediting update: The New Plot of "Enter the Monkeywrench" Part 1, With Cliffhanger

The new opening section of Enter the Monkeywrench, originally the longer chapters 1-4 but now numbered 1-7, has a distinct plot with a cliffhanger ending. What Hugh Howey did with his now famous Silo Trilogy was revive the Golden Age science-fiction serial-novel tradition in ebook format. Such A.E. van Vogt novels as Slan and The World of Null-A actually read like Saturday-matinee movie serials in prose; Jommy Cross and Gilbert Gosseyn wouldn't be out of place alongside Commando Cody. I realized, I can do this too. Movie serials, and the short '70s TV revival of the format in the series Cliffhanger!, are actually a major influence on my writing. Of course, unlike the classic Republic and RKO serials, and much of Van Vogt's work, I go out of my way to avoid the plot contrivances that are a danger of the serial format, whether in movie serials or serial-format TV shows.

The final Enter the Monkeywrench Chapter 1 turned out to be entirely new material. I introduced a new character (a corrupted Edison Carter whom I named "Jack Campbell" after a certain SF magazine editor whose public decline is infamous) and killed him off. I introduced characters I'd previously saved for later. I established the stakes for the novel. In the previous chapters — the Intro, Interlude 0, and Chapter 0, in that order — I established the stakes for the entire Chaos Angel Spanner series.

I decided to split those four long long chapters I'd novelized out of comics issues and TV episodes into shorter chapters that focus on single characters or groups of characters. In the new Chapter 7 I'll combine the threads as they converge into a monster cliffhanger.

With the Intro, the new Interlude 0 ("The Monkeywrench Cometh", the actual introduction of the character Spanner to the series, reworked from Interlude 14 R2 and Interlude 6 R4), and new Chapter 0 ("First Blast of the Trumpet", a reworking of my original R5 Chapter 0 idea) at the beginning and the new Chapter 7 with its cliffhanger at the end, I could release this part as an ebook in itself, possibly even for free, with the four sequels that make up the rest of the novel priced at one dollar (or pound, or euro) apiece.

In fact, this is how I'm rewriting each part of Enter the Monkeywrench, leading up to the biggest cliffhanger of all, the one at the end of the novel, which has remained substantially the same through all the versions of Chapter (now Book) 1 since 2010.

Come to think of it, I may still be doing that comics/TV serial-novelization thing after all...

#Spanner R5 #amediting update: Final Plot Reorganization: The Path Is Now Straight

I had something of a dry period. I added and subtracted some things, but I never finished a chapter except for the Intro. Suddenly I realized that the flashback-heavy structure of Chapter 1 R4 was not suited to a full novel. So I've made one final reorganization of the plot so that all its events occur in order, making the plot both less confusing and more relentless. Those "fixed patterns" Jennifer sees in the beginning? They will relentlessly converge until they collide in the final chapters.

I'm also shortening the chapters. Each chapter will follow one plot thread or series of related threads at a time, another way of uncomplicating the plot. It won't seem so indigestible. By shortening the chapters, I should be able to shorten the book as well, even though there will be more chapters.

As a bonus, I decided to throw in a terrorist faction I hadn't thought of using for at least a decade and a half and which previously existed only in a series of index cards and a few scattered entries in a mid-90s Project Notebook. That faction is one of many that Brinkman sends after our heroines in the new Chapter 1.

I'm doing all this because I intend Enter the Monkeywrench to be the introduction to the Chaos Angel Spanner series. I want it to go down easy. Once I've seduced my readers into this strange world, then I can get as complicated as I want, starting with the dual timelines of Book 2 (Rock City Blues). Besides, Enter the Monkeywrench takes place on a single day; the other volumes stretch over weeks or even months.

Next comes the actual throwing around of scenes. Now that the Intro and Enter the Monkeywrench Chapters 0 and 1 are all but perfect, I've already started.

Spanner R5 #amediting Update: Mid-Book Part 2: Later Additions Force Early Revisions

This seems to happen to me a lot: something I add to a later chapter requires that I retcon earlier chapters to fit the newly changed continuity. In this case, newly revised events in the final two flashback chapters (13 and 15) have just put events taking place in earlier chapters later in the timeline (Chapters 2-4) out of continuity. Specifically, the scenes involving two new villains added to Chapters 2 and 3 are now out of order, and one thread in Chapter 3 now takes place in the present rather than the past (earlier the day of the story i.e. as part of the flashback arc).

There's a bigger reason for this. The flashback chapters include a thread involving the COPCO agents starting in Chapter 7 and another which starts each flashback chapter, and both have tight plots. In its current state, the main thread is just a mess of expository dialogue interrupted by a few major events. The way the sideplots turned out made me realize that I need to give the flashback arc the tight plot it currently lacks. The mess is a carryover from Chapter 1 R4, in which the flashback arc was just a series of quick flashback scenes, each dedicated to a single reveal. But when I expanded Chapter 1 into an entire book, this no longer worked. Hence, the new plot.

It's the events of this new "earlier today" plot that are making me rewrite scenes in the earlier chapters. This is all for the better because it'll make for a stronger plot.

Spanner R5 #amediting Update: Halfway Through the Final Draft, With Ebook

Remember that plot spreadsheet I said I'd make?
Well, I made it, but it ended up taking too long for me to map the plot threads and character arcs with it, so I deleted it. However, thanks to Sigil, I am now building up the ebook chapter by chapter. With 10 chapters (counting the Intro) out of 21 (including Interlude 1) now complete, I'm halfway through the final draft at last. And it took me like forever?

Karen, the sweet Buddhist cousin, is now one of the flyers surfing the raging storm over New York on her hoverboard and laying Spanner tags. Amanda, the pretty TV reporter, now has a plot thread of her own, complete with character arc. Two of the characters I created around the time I came up with the final series name (in 1999) or the five-volume series plan (2000), the Treece brothers I based loosely on the Bogard brothers of the Fatal Fury videogame series (while I was in the middle of watching the anime at Cliff's Comic World, in fact; Adam = Andy roughly, and Kevin = Terry) finally got a reason to exist as independent characters in their own right — as hoverboard racers, Kevin laying his own Spanner tags from LA to Pittsburgh and leaving the "Climinal Team" flyers to take over from him in New York.

And yes, they are indeed calling themselves "Climinal Team", after a certain selectable team in what Shira calls simply "an old shmup" (specifically Armed Police Batrider; and yes, it's misspelled that way in the game), to signify in typically facetious Shira fashion that they're technically the villains in an America built on the supremacy of heroes. (Note: Batrider's excuse plot just happens to be set in Manhattan, in 2014, just as the dénouement of Enter the Monkeywrench was before I moved the timeline forward to 2018 last year i.e. in 2014.)

Getting halfway through the final draft is an achievement in itself. But that still leaves the other half of the book incomplete. I can't stop until the draft is finished and ready for my beta readers. There's also the matter of the Enter the Monkeywrench cover and the Chaos Angel Spanner series logo, both of which I'm continuing to procrastinate so far. So back to the edit it is. And the distraction I was hoping to avoid, namely NaPoWriMo, which my capricious muse won't let me avoid anyway. Oh well...

Spanner R5 #amediting Update: In Which I Give Up on the Olden Ways and Start a Plot Spreadsheet

I have just discovered, long after I should have, just how extremely difficult it is to plot a novel as complicated as Spanner Book 1 without a spreadsheet. Until now I've had this stubborn notion, dating way, way back to the Apple II days of VisiCalc, that spreadsheets are for business calculating stuff no different from the paper ledgers that inspired the original spreadsheets. So for the last 3 years or so I was trying to wrestle this unwieldy plot into shape without a spreadsheet until I finally gave up.

This is the kind of thing that makes me feel old.

Anyway, I have started a spreadsheet for Spanner Book 1. Already my mind has started making the connections that evaded me when I was still trying to do everything in the HTML files. My writing may have improved by leaps and bounds because of all that editing, but plotting has been a lot more difficult. The spreadsheet is already making a difference.

And so I'm going to take a break from the rewriting for a while, though here and there I'll still slip in a few new scenes (one set at the end of "act 2" even contains a huge cliffhanger), until I've entered all the chapters and scenes into the new spreadsheet.

Some things just have to be done. It's a wonder I avoided doing it for so long.

Spanner R5 #amediting Update: The Insidious Plot, or Making This Thing Coherent

There's still a lot of chapters in Spanner Book 1, especially in the flashback chapters, which are made up of pretty much nothing but exposition. Originally I compiled them out of short segments which, in their original context as scenes scattered throughout the second half of Chapter 1 R4, didn't need action. Well, now that the short segments are part of long chapters, they need to contribute more than just background exposition to the plot. And so I'm going to plot the chapters. Among other things, I'm adding action, suspense, and antagonism generally.

There are seven flashback chapters. I have at least rough plots in mind for the first four:

1. "The Emergent Pattern": what choice of action will Jennifer take, and will it clash with Shira's?
2. "Climinal Team Origin": the girls have to convince Rico to join them for better reasons than just money and thrills.
3. "Breakfast at Winkie's": the team have to fend off both terrorists and cops at the same time and still get the weaponized malware and Cold War tech they need for their mission.
4. "Welcome to the Penguindrome": they have to root out a group of "boxed crook" police infiltrators, including one who will later become a major villain whose final act sets off the plot of Book 6.

The problem here is that the remaining three flashback chapters don't yet even have plots I can connect with each other and the present-time chapters. Agent Niemeyer and Paulie the Worm, who appear in "Breakfast at Winkie's", don't return to the foreground until the last flashback chapter, "The Fuses Have Been Lit". As for the remaining chapters, "Know Your Enemy" and "The Chosen One", I haven't even decided which segments of Chapter 1 R4 go where.

I have the same problem with several of the present-time chapters as well: they remain unplotted.

So here's my next challenge: before I get back to editing the narration and dialogue, I must give all these neglected chapters the plots they require, as if they really are the TV episodes I once intended them to be. Once I give them their structure, the rest should come easier.

NaNoWriMo 2014: Victory #9 Achieved: or, It Was Spanner What Done It

I thought winning my ninth NaNoWriMo would be a cinch. Problem is, the novel wouldn't come. Then I realize that only one novel would come:

Chaos Angel Spanner Book 6: Business Is War. That one.

And indeed it came. I remembered several of the plot points I'd put in the initial five-volume manga plan I mapped out in the Project Notebooks back in 2000, plus several others I'd worked out or at least thought up in the years since. I found myself making references to the previous five volumes, indeed all the way back to the Spanner Incident in Book 1. My muse threw me several shocking new plot twists, including the deaths of several villains, the entire Socialist Revolutionary Organization left-wing terrorist group (with former villains as its new members), and even what is possibly the coolest character in the series, Willa (though the muse is already bringing her back in an equally shocking way at the beginning of Book 7).

I hit a surprising number of major plot points. This is a major improvement over two years ago, when I didn't get much of Book 5 written (when it was Book 3) and didn't hit most of the important plot points. I'll have to revisit Book 5 sometime soon, just to map out the plot more completely. But right now I'm taking a break after eleven days of way too much writing.

December will be my month for editing Book 1. My goal will be to edit it completely and send it out to my beta readers before New Year's Eve. It's getting ever more urgent as history catches up to my speculative fiction at an ever faster pace.

But first, I'm going to sit back and savor my ninth NaNoWriMo victory. Champagne is in order.

Spanner R5 #amediting Update: Abandoning the "Non-Novel" for a Coherent Flashback Structure

In the original version of the new Spanner Book 1, I split not just the old Chapter 1 apart but various chapters from all over Book 1 R4 into shorter new chapters made up mainly of single sequences, then trying to organize them on the order of John Brunner's "non-novel" Stand on Zanzibar. After I moved the timeline forward to 2018, enough major plot elements changed along with the characters' ages that I find myself combining chapters again. Here's a short rundown of the first five chapters alone:

• Intro: To the end of the original version, which hadn't changed all that much in 4 years, I tacked on Chapter 1's date tag ("19 August 2018") and its associated epigraphs, followed by the new R5 scene in which Shira gets her mission which becomes the Spanner Incident that is the focus of the new Book 1.
• Interlude 0: To the already unorganized mess that is Revision 5's new Interlude, I'm merging the chapter that previously followed it, called "The Age of Unreason". I plan to reorganize so that the entire "old Jennifer meets young Jennifer" thread becomes a single scene followed by the flash-forwards that gives this Interlude its name, "Foregone Conclusions". I may move some villain scenes into the next chapter, or not, depending.
• "The First Blast of the Trumpet": From "Welcome to Spanner's World", I moved the short Leila scene and expanded it. A new action sequence introduces the myth arc I borrowed from Jack the Giant-Killer (which the title references) and has our distaff Jack, Shira, killing her first "monster" in the series, here a transhuman mercenary with multiple Bioroid bodies. The double epigraph to the original Chapter 1 are now here; previously it was in a chapter I'm not keeping, "The Beginning of the End"
• "Welcome to Spanner's World": In addition to the various epigraphs to various later chapters in Book 1 R4, I inserted some epigraphs and character quotes taken from "The Age of Unreason". In place of the Leila scene I moved to the previous chapter, I inserted the entire chapter "Escape from Harmony", which is basically her escape scene from Drusilla's "halfway house". Spanner himself became the focus for a new opening intended to foreshadow the very last chapter ("Spanner in the Works") and an extended version of this chapter's final sequence with added backstory.
• "The Point of No Return", formerly "The Day of Destiny": The original chapter is now a framing sequence for the series of flashbacks that used to be the chapters "Beauty Queen on the Television Screen" (containing Leila and Shira backstory) and "The Bright-Eyed Girl" a.k.a. "Bright-Eyed Captive" (Amanda's backstory), then rearranged things to my satisfaction. But the result is that this has become quite a long chapter.

What I did was abandon the "non-novel" approach with its single linear continuity intercut with its related short stories, essays, and collections of "happening" fragments for a coherent flashback narrative. I abandoned the nonlinear structure of Stand on Zanzibar for that most complex of flashback structures, the one which structures David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. The structure of Enter the Monkeywrench is far from identical to Mulholland Drive's, but I'm modifying that template even without the content (since I plotted what is now the final chapter, "Spanner in the Works", along with the Intro before that movie even came out). Thus, the flashback and background chapters I wrote for the first version of Book 1 R5, I'm either incorporating into other chapters in their entirety or breaking up to put in more than one chapter. That's how, for instance, the entire chapter "Escape from Harmony" became the replacement Leila sequence of "Welcome to Spanner's World". I've settled on long chapters this time, not short ones; "Spanner in the Works", after all, is one of the longest chapters in the book.

So far, of the first five chapters, I've finished all but Interlude 0. I'm continuing to stick to my decistion to abandon chapter numbers in the Fifth Revision, since I'm no longer doing Spanner as a comics or TV novelization but simply as a novel.

Spanner R5 #amediting Update: The New Direction

Resetting the first four books of Chaos Angel Spanner four years in the future has changed some things, some in major ways. Admittedly, the new Book 1 had become something of a mess in the edit. I was attempting my own version of the complicated structure science fiction author John Brunner used in his 1967 masterpiece Stand on Zanzibar. Shifting the timeline forward allowed me to remove the backstory and pseudo-essay chapters that were getting me in trouble. Now I'm combining chapters and putting parts of some chapters into others. Even the Intro, which I thought I got completely finished two years ago, isn't untouched; parts of what was to be the following chapter got moved there, including both the prologue and the quote section from Chapter 1 R4.

I've simplified Book 1's structure. I'm building on a flashback-narrative structure that alternates "present day" and "earlier today" chapters for the first two-thirds to three-quarters of the book, after which I may alternate the long climactic chapters with shorter chapters containing crucial backstory reveals. Various character threads get introduced in the second story chapter ("Welcome to Spanner's World") and split apart in all directions only to collide in the final two chapters ("Prelude to Ascension" and "Spanner in the Works") and the explosive climax. All the main story chapters will remain, but I'm adding a few new scenes and moving some of the backstory there. Moved into the story chapters, backstory flashbacks will need to serve as important reveals or Shocking Revelations, or I'll move them elsewhere or edit them out. My goal is to make it more readable for the casual reader who's used to similarly structured thrillers.

I'm expanding Leila's role in Book 1. Originally I had her appear in three scenes: one toward the beginning, one in the middle, and one near the very end. This worked when the new Book 1 was merely Chapter 1, the equivalent of a television pilot episode. It doesn't work so well when what was a chapter expands into an entire novel. She's one of the most important characters in the entire series, more important to the action than just being Shira's love interest, so she deserves an expanded role in the volume that introduces her. And so instead of just sending her off toward Seattle sleeping in the back of her aunt Ariel's car at the very end, I'm putting her front and center in the climax. She wasn't in the original "Spanner in the Works" from 2010; now she's one of the reasons it happens.

So far I've added to the Intro and finished the first story chapter, "First Blast of the Trumpet" (the name's a reference to the folktale Jack the Giant-Killer, in which Jack begins the battle against the final giant by calling the villagers to his aid with his horn, and from which I'm taking the series' myth arc). I have three scenes left to do in "Welcome to Spanner's World", two existing scenes to edit and one expansion of the final scene. I've taken several quotes, from both characters and real-life people, from the now omitted chapter "The Age of Unreason" and inserted them in "Welcome..."; other parts will go into Interlude 0 and into later chapters.

My goal is to get as much of Book 1 edited before NaNoWriMo as I can. Here goes...

Spanner R5 #amediting Update: Shira's 15th Birthday and the Second Radical New Plot Change

Spanner main character Shira Thomas turns 15 today. The first volume (originally chapter) of the series, dated August 19, has already taken place. Considering how much time I've been taking to write and edit this thing (four years already?), it looks like events have already overtaken the story. Therefore, I must make one more radical change to the series.

• The first radical change: turn Chapter 1, Chapters 2-4, and the School Arc of the old Book 1 into three separate volumes, the new Books 1-3.
• The second radical change: Move the series start date forward 4 years, to 2018.

Now that Spanner begins in 2018, I can solve two major problems with the original 2000 plan:

1. the fact that so many of the major characters were underage, making them overly precocious in intelligence and maturity, and causing a potential legal problem around their sexual libertinism; now they're all 18 or over (or in Elle's case almost 18), which also eliminates the added potential problem of this story potentially being swept into the "YA ghetto";
2. the fact that the story is no longer "twenty minutes into the future," as I don't intend to write an alternate-universe story set in what is now the past.

It also eliminates the plot complication from the old Chapter 2 of Shira seducing private cop J.T. Sparks and then blackmailing him over her being underage, and reduces what was the major turning point of 12/21/12 nearly two years before the story began into a relatively minor backstory event 6 years in the past. But oh well, sometimes tradeoffs must be made.

In the new Book 3, containing the complete School Arc, the cousins Shira, Jennifer, and Karen are now plausible college students, though Karen can no longer be Bangor High's head cheerleader now that she's being aged up to 21. The Shelley twins likewise make more plausible fallen fashion models at 19 (turning 20 at the beginning of the new Book 4). Team Bremelo now become credible adults for the students to envy or hero-worship. And Shira can get away with an all-nude all-Rocker 19th birthday, though she'll still be agitating to lower the voting age to at least 16.

The new Spanner Book 1 now takes place on 19 August 2018. Book 7 will end in November 2020. Now I have some leeway so I can spend more time editing and formatting Books 1-3 to my liking. But I can't take too long. I want Book 1 over, done, and ready to publish before NaNoWriMo.

So it begins again...

Spanner Update: A Completely New Publishing Plan in Not 5 (or 6) Volumes, but 7

In a flash of inspiration while waiting for my mother at the dentist's office, I realized that I've been doing this Spanner thing all wrong. Not the writing, actually; most of it's at least good enough. Mostly it's the editing, for this reason: the five-volume plan I came up with back in 2000, to which I later added a Book 0, has proved inadequate for what I've written so far.

And so, while Mom and I were eating lunch, the new plan began to emerge in my mind. The chapters, threads, and arcs scattered like the cards in a game of "52 Pickup", and here's how they settled:

1. Enter the Monkeywrench: the Intro, the new Interlude 0 ("Foregone Conclusions", with the "two Jennifers" sequence from Interlude 6 now framing a sequence of flash-forwards), Chapter 1, and Interlude 1. As it's already a complete novella, it's fitting that this should serve as the "pilot episode".
2. Banned in Japan: (temporary working title) The Japan arc originally planned for Book 0, now a flashback thread; the first four chapters from the original Book 1 including the complete uncut Rebel Styles thread and representing the "present time" following from the new Book 1; a few later scenes as "flash-forwards"; and the relevant Interludes (by their current numbering): 2 ("The Brown Note"), 3 ("One Nation Under Copyright, All Rights Reserved"), 5 ("Approaching Solstice, December 2012"), 8 ("Rebel, Rebel"), 9 ("City on the Edge of a Dream"), and 15 ("Six Degrees of Keenan Sasser"). All flashbacks related to the Shira/Leila relationship line will be moved here.
3. Love Terrorists: the complete School Arc from Chapters 5-21, plus Interludes 6 (as the new opening, to be renamed "Previously On..." and rewritten), 4 ("The Rules of Tournament"), 7 ("Pop Will Eat Itself"), 10 ("You Have Lost the Game"), and 16 ("The Ego and His Own"). I may want to merge the events of Chapter 15 into Chapters 22 and 23.
4. Rock City Blues: Chapters 22 and 23 from Book 1, all of Book 2 except for the Pretty City Arc, and Interludes 13 ("This Is Not America") and 14 ("The Crisis") as a frame.
5. Mad Frontier: the original Book 3 plan, now condensed, centering on the pivotal Phoenix Arc.
6. Business Is War: the original Book 4 plan with the Pretty City Arc from the Book 2 plan now added.
7. Revolution Rock: the original Book 5 as planned, beginning with the final Interlude and ending with the Outro.

The new vision for the series is as a novelized 6-season TV series with a pilot movie. The chapters will be shorter and (from the new Book 2 onward) be renumbered by volume/season (e.g. the original Chapter 5 is now 3-1). Each volume will have its own plot in addition to the series continuity. And I'm going to make each book much more coherent, though just as head-spinning as ever.

So what's my new plan for the new Books 1 and 2?

• Work out the complete Book 2 and transplant various scenes from the old Book 1.
• Edit the original Chapter 1 (now unnumbered) accordingly.

In fact, I've already started doing it. I've started editing this blog's Spanner series page to add the new series plan; when I'm done with it, I'll tell you here.

And thus does it begin again...

Spanner R5 #amediting Update: Chapter 1 Is Done! (again... for now...)

Okay, I claimed that a few months ago. But after a few months' break, including FAWM and my first NaPoWriMo, I went back to the Chapter 1 HTML page and took another long look at it. I got a few new ideas in the intervening months and edited them in. I got some really cool ideas while editing (e.g. the fedora Willa stole from Henry Becket back in 1992 when they divorced) and threw them in. I found a couple continuity errors and corrected them. Then I made a few more tweaks. And now, for the second time, I can declare Chapter 1 done.

Except for that "for now" part. You see, I've finally started actually writing Book 0, Banned in Japan. I've plotted several scenes for the first two chapters and am working on an overall plot that will fit in the continuity of Book 1 Revision 5. Turns out Steve Jobs is not the first "posthumous man" Shira assassinates, and they're called "Ascended", and she takes out two more Ascended in the course of Book 0, and one of them was the killer guru responsible for the 1995 Tokyo subway nerve gas attacks bombings. And even he isn't the first Ascended she takes out, only the first she takes out in the series. Ostensibly Shira's there as an exchange student; however, she's really there on a contract, to kill a ghost.

Book 0 also introduces some characters who appear later in Book 1, possibly later. Previously existing characters who now debut here: baka-boy gangster Koji Mizoguchi, "world's worst kogal" Nenene Sasakawa, loli slavegirl Ayla Izumi (whom Shira rescues here), deranged detective Locke Holmes, the Tachibana sisters with mother Umi and cute male cousin Seika, and some of the major characters whom I couldn't leave out. Jennifer, both before and after the Blake Island incident, gets some side scenes and phone calls; Karen gets introduced as Shira's counterpoint (the teenage female Victor Laszlo); Henry Becket gets his first scene in the first chapter, in which as Secretary of National Security he browbeats the American ambassador to Japan and strongly hints that he does the same to the Secretary of State back home; Shira's dad Ric appears on tour with a Band with No Name side project (in Book 1 he makes his first appearance in Chapter 3); and others I'll likely fit in. An idea just popped into my head at just this moment: might Debbie be there too, trying to be something of a blond teenage female Golgo 13 only to find out her target is a ghost? And of course Leila, who plays such a central role in every subsequent book in the series as love interest and deuteragonist, should hover over the prequel as an "absent presence" at least mentioned every chapter and already clearly Shira's obsession.

Oh, and the chapters are numbered -13 to 0, with Interlude 0 ("Foregone Conclusions") coming before Chapter 0.

So as the plot of Book 0 develops, I'm bound to make a few more edits to Chapter 1. In fact, I just realized there's one edit I need to make now: the one about Shira having already killed three targets like Steve Jobs — that is, three Ascended. And so a-#amediting I go again...

Spanner R5 Update: The #amediting Resumes; Plus, the New Chapter 4 Plan

It's been a while since I've done any actual edits on Spanner. Since FAWM began, to be exact. I was so busy writing 28 songs and agonizing over my inadequate singing and playing skills that I dropped the Revision 5 edit altogether. I'm returning to the script with only the first section of Chapter 3 scripted. The R5 version will be roughly like previous versions, especially once I get it novelized.

However, Chapter 4 R5 will be very different from previous versions. Most of it, starting with section 2 or 3, will be a single sequence with several intercut threads, dominated by a completely new thread called "Capital Day" focusing on the Party's corporatist replacement for the American version of Labor Day, the very idea of which the Corporates revile as "commonist". I intend to introduce several major series themes in this chapter. The most important, though, is "the second half of the end of the Cold War", better known as "the fall of the American Empire", an America that declined into the corporatist version of Stalinist Russia and is about to suffer its fate despite the Herculean efforts of America's future (as of Chapter 15) superhero dictator. Introduced along with it: the "foregone conclusion" motif involving the story brazenly spoiling its own endings, whether they're inevitable (the aforementioned imperial collapse, already far advanced when the Conservative Revolution attempted to prevent it starting in 2012) or self-fulfilling prophecies (Henry Becket, the superhero dictator, bringing the end about by trying to prevent it).

To get the new Chapter 4 organized, I'm going to have to break open a pack of index cards for the first time in years, write the scenes on them, and fling them around. Some older scenes likely won't make it into the final version. Whatever scenes survive will surely be the most interesting.

Meanwhile, I've started the tedious process of editing all the Revision 4 chapter and section posts to read "Revision 4" instead of "Final Revision", because R4 is not the Final Revision. The actual Final Revision (i.e. Revision 5) is turning out much different from previous versions. Since Revision 5 is already turning out to be far superior to the posted Revision 4, I'm editing the posts accordingly. This will probably take a few days.

Spanner R5 #amediting Update: Chapter 2 Script Finished, or: The Mess Makes Way for Awesome

As I mentioned last post, Spanner Chapter 2 had accumulated an unmanageable mess of scenes between the Fourth and Final Revisions. I thought I'd never be able to cut it away. I then realized I could make an end run around my Inner Editor by returning to the TV script version I did for the final two years of Script Frenzy. My hunch was right; it did the job. The script version of Chapter 2 is now complete.

Here's a (probably) incomplete list of the many changes:

1. 2.1: "Lethal Lolita" is now the name of the "cold open" sequence that plays before the Spanner logo descends and announces the episode name and so on. The opening news reports with the Bin Laden and Spanner video messages now segue smoothly into Henry Becket's videocall with the first local villain and then the appearance of Rebel Styles who then makes said villain her first victim in the series before she screws up the scene and the logo makes its appearance. New scenes: the goddess Nike whose body is the corporation named after her invades Shira's dreamspace only to get kicked out; the COPCO agents on the plane from New York to Seattle; on the passenger plane home, Shira takes a call from Teachers Guild president Dr. Jenna Hunter and accepts her offer at once (think Butch Coolidge in his first appearance in Pulp Fiction).
2. 2.2: Now called "Coming Home". The interrogation scene that has migrated throughout the chapter's first half in various drafts is now its centerpiece. "Ghost Hunting", the original 2.2, is now a sequence beginning here. New scenes: the homecoming at Sea-Tac Airport; Shira and the other surviving hoverboard racers getting fired by the head of the Xtreme Racing League over the Spanner incident and the death of Rico X; a phone call in which Ariel taunts her enemy Drusilla.
3. 2.3: now the section called "Ghost Hunting", not to be confused with the thread, which now extends into Chapter 3. The scene where Shira enters her apartment for the first time in the series is now here, and her older half-sister Selene now makes her debut here. The first of the nameless women, the petite Asian woman who first appeared in Chapter 12 R4, is now the apartment building manager. Shira, Elle, and Akimi, no longer racing for the XRL, take their first trip to Kitsap Kouriers (introduced in 4.4 up to R4) and get hired immediately.
4. 2.4: Now "Playing Rebel's Game". It begins with another interrogation scene, now the first personal encounter between Shira and major character J.T. (Jim) Sparks, who in Book 1 is a COPCO agent; his father Brendan Sparks owns COPCO. The shopping-arcade scene that's taken several forms over the various drafts now introduces the second nameless woman, the tall brunette ex-swimmer-cum-ex-psychologist who first appeared in 10.1 R4, who now works as the food-court espresso-cart barista; also, fellow ex-racer Liz McPhail appears here and annoys Shira into calling her "Epica"; and Shira and Leila meet eyes for the first time.
5. 2.5: still "The Rebel Sell". Another corporation-god invades Shira's dreamspace, this time AT&T, and gets the Spanner tag sprayed all over it. The one scene I actually omitted from Chapter 1 R5, "Get Ready for the Bad Endings" with Keenan and Ada, is now here in 2.5 and much shorter; it's now where Shira announces her intention to make sure nobody (especially Brinkman) interferes with the election taking place in Chapter 23, plus the "bad endings" are now specifically the ones described in Interlude 10. The "Henry Becket and his mother" scene that ended Chapter 2 in R4 is also now a thread, and it begins here.
6. 2.6: Formerly "The Dangerous Type", it's traded names with the chapter for R5 and is now called "Sex Bomb". The "Henry Becket and his mother" thread continues until it ends in the final minute of cliffhangers; the thread's name is in fact "The Angel of Chaos" and has the mother (Mrs. Abernethy) nearly die from finding out in mid-scry that Shira's completely immune to fate. The central thread is now a duel of sex and blackmail between Shira and J.T. that ends in his crushing defeat at the hands of the mistress of the "WHAM! line" in another cliffhanger. The episode of The Civet that was in R4 has been replaced by the funeral and deification of Rico X in his native Brazil (celebrities, gotta love 'em), and Minty Fresh gets her first appearance as Rico's grieving girlfriend. And now the final scene of the chapter is now the signing-on of pirate television KCUF which was previously at the end of 2.2.
7. The Leila sequence: It's now broken up into a thread recurring through the episode and culminating in Leila and Shira meeting eyes for the first time.
8. Rebel Styles' Victims: There's only one this episode now, and now it's a thread stretching to Chapter 12 or 13. Instead of being the first victim, Shepherd-Mayor Ward Tremayne will be the last, and it's this along with Leila's success in erasing her name that provokes the by-then irrational Governor Brinkman into initiating the madness that is Chapter 15.

By choosing to script the TV version instead of sorting out the prose mess, I've managed to bring to Chapter 2 a coherence it's never had before, primarily by sorting the various scenes into a small number of closely intercut threads. I'd have to say that the final Chapter 2 is now almost as perfect as Chapter 1. Like the Intro and Chapter 1, Chapter 2 now brings the awesome.

As a bonus, I've completed 3.1 as well. The "teaser" sequence is now "Stalking Minty Fresh", which used to be in 3.2. After that, Leila gets disgusted with the music available in America as she did at the very beginning of 3.1 R4, followed by Shira's dream of Kira and early-morning videophone duel with family enemy Henry Becket, whom she of course checkmates. The new additions: the two nameless women explain why they're nameless and how they manage to remain so without losing their identity (and here R5 background villain Doctor X, a Conservative Revolutionary leader who became its Benedict Arnold and can never again be named on penalty of expulsion from the Party); and Jennifer gives Shira a pre-birthday present which is in effect the Wold Newton Universe version of the Akio Car from Revolutionary Girl Utena.

Right now, instead of scripting Chapter 3 past 3.1, my Spanner edits are focused on changes to subsequent chapters, mainly in the form of notes. Since this is February Album Writing Month, I'm focusing mainly on writing and recording songs, primarily a certain few earworms that have been haunting me over the past few years of relentless Spanner edits (here's my FAWM profile). By necessity I'll be paying less attention to the Chapter 3 script, but I'll find a way to get it done this month. Stay tuned...

2014 Projects: Finish the Spanner Edit, Write Book 0, and Get Published

The holiday season was my excuse to slack off from editing and writing at the end of 2013. The combination of a Blu-Ray player and a new widescreen TV didn't help. That's over now. I've had my year-end vacation. It's back to work. And the muse is obliging with the craziest story ideas I've had in a long time:

1. The entire plot to Spanner Book 0, complete with new title ("Banned in Japan"). Now it begins with a Yakuza-Triad war interrupted by a certain masked prankster and graffiti tagger who goes by the handle Spanner, and ends with a political crisis that may end in a devastating war between an increasingly fascist Japan and Chinese Communist Party (Holdings) Limited.
2. A new graphic novel idea incorporating the "Blake Island incident" repeatedly referred to in Spanner Book 1, and which takes up one night during the time period of Spanner Book 0. On the night of July 14 this year, Jennifer will kill 52 hitmen, mercenaries, and serial killers. Now I know how it begins: with her and some far more broken female former child soldiers robbing the Seattle Triad (under flashy young boss Ringo Wing) of money, sex slaves, and a snuff pornographer who resembles an infamous web cartoonist, as dozens of disposable gangsters die John Woo style (I ask myself the question: how would Lone Wolf and Cub artist Goseki Kojima do a "heroic bloodshed" shootout?). Because it's so action-oriented, it will not be called "The Jennifer Theory"; I'll have to find yet another new story to match that title.
3. Three final tweaks to Spanner Chapter 1 (Jennifer's "Red Baron name" changed from Blonde Phantom to White Phantom; Shira kicking Johnny-Johnny in "his nonexistent manhood" to begin a recurring motif linked to the Blake Island incident and ending in Chapter 11; and a rewrite of the fourth flashback) and such a complete overhaul of Chapter 2 R5 that I'm even switching the positions of 2.2 and 2.3 to avoid pointless time reversals.

Getting that graphic novel off the ground necessitates, of course, that I start drawing again and actually improve my skills so I can actually draw real comics. I decided I'll even throw in a "comic within a comic", of the bad-webcomic kind, which I'll draw in the inferior style I abandoned in 1999, when I stopped trying to ape Masamune Shirow (and failing) and began developing my more recent Clamp-influenced style, which I'm now modifying in a more Takeshi Obata direction that allows me to incorporate more of my "school of Alex Raymond" influences: Neal Adams, Ryoichi Ikegami, Tony Wong, and Raymond himself (with elements taken from Will Eisner and midperiod Frank Miller).

Meanwhile, I'm going to get one non-Spanner novel published this year. In March, during NaNoEdMo, I'm going to pick one previous NaNoWriMo novel and edit it to as close to publication quality as I can in one month. I have four options: Bad Company from 2007, Black Science from 2008, Dirty Pop from 2009, and Freefall from 2013. Once I feel it's ready for release, I'll publish it online. Thus, after 25 years of practice and planning, I will become a published author at last. Then in April, now that Script Frenzy is dead, I'll throw myself into NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month) the way I do FAWM. To be a NaPoWriMo winner, you must write a poem a day for 30 days. I'll do my usual stuff inspired by the Surrealists and Beats, of course, but I'll also make my first attempts at traditional forms such as the sonnet, ode, and villanelle.

Above all, 2014 will be the year I complete the final edit of Spanner Book 1. Last year it took me 5 whole months to edit Chapter 1. One reason is that I completely changed certain older story elements (e.g. removing Hope and Karen and replacing them with Elle and new character Rico) and threw in new ones (e.g. the propaganda-video opening). I will not spend that much time on any later chapter, no matter how much I change it, not even Chapter 2 which I'm radically overhauling. Books 0, 1, and 2 are set this year, so I plan to get at least Book 1 published this year, Book 0 if I can squeeze it in.

And so it begins again...

Spanner R5 Update: Putting the Axe to Chapter 2 (with 2.2 now complete)

At last, I've begun editing Spanner Chapter 2! 2.2 turned out to be surprisingly easy to edit, so I finished it first, complete with new scenes. The next order of business is 2.1, which follows directly on the events of Chapter 1 and continues its threads, including scenes starring Leila (dating back as far as Revision 2) and Ariel (a new opening for the final version). Like I said, I finished 2.2 first because I found it easy, even to cut down the original scene ("Ghost Hunting" from Revision 1) so I could add the new ones — and "What Shira Knows", the interrogation scene I originally wrote for 2.3 and then moved to 2.1 for R4; and even that scene I made major changes to, echoing the similar scene in 16.1.

I'm editing 2.1 next because the scenes I keep in and the order I put them in will determine the order of scenes from 2.3 to the end of the chapter. These are the new scenes I'm adding:

1. "Ariel's Vision": Leila's aunt, the hot witch with the white-striped black hair, induces a vision that puts Chapter 1's Spanner Incident in its wider context, subtly foreshadows future events, introduces the theme of fate vs. freedom, and reveals the true reason why she's become archenemy to the Beckets and especially Drusilla — and that just happens to involve the Holy Grail.
2. "Message from the Evil One": the ghost of Osama bin Laden wimp-shames America. Only his smirking face will be visible.
3. "Introducing the Beckets": a little three-paragraph exposition that does exactly what the title says: introduce the ruling clan.
4. "Tender Enemies": the videophone call in which Willa taunts her ex-husband Henry Becket, which I mentioned last post.
5. "Get Ready for the Bad Endings": a scene removed from Chapter 1 (1.2 in R2, 1.4 in R3 and R4) to become the heroes' own retrospective on the Spanner Incident. It still introduces the "Bad Endings" described in detail in Interlude 10. To fit it in its final place, I'll have to cut it down pretty severely.
6. "Great Nike Is Not Pleased": the corporation that owns the monopoly on all sports and their arenas (Madison Square Garden during the Spanner Incident) reveals itself as the incarnation of its namesake goddess (the Greek goddess of victory) and tries to attack Shira in her own dreamspace only to discover that in dreamspace, Shira's power is equal to hers. The myth behind this scene, one of the series' two core myths (the Theomachy, or the War of the Gods, with the Olympian generation of gods now under siege from an upstart new generation: humanity itself), will be made explicit in 2.3, by none other than Ariel.
7. "The Call" and "The Arrival": Shira gets a call on the flight home from her mother's nemesis, Teachers Guild president Dr. Jenna Hunter, and accepts her offer to be a college-student tutor at Metropolitan Seattle's toughest school, Bangor High. Once in Seattle, she and her cousins (and niece and sister) meet Willa and Angela outside the airport terminal only to be interrupted by police agents Sparks and Kowalczyk, leading into "What Shira Knows". In fact, these two scenes are the original reason I decided to move "What Shira Knows" from 2.1 R4 into 2.2.

The appearances of Spanner and Rebel, which I originally built 2.1 around in R2, will remain, along with the villains' post-Incident follow-up meeting, which in their current (post-R4) state consist of three different scenes I need to combine into one. Other than that, just as I mentioned last post, 2.1 will be vastly different from even the R4 version.

Once I've straightened out 2.1, I'll bring back Ariel in 2.3 to give Shira a Tarot card reading (of the story itself, actually, and her role in it) and introduce the first of the nameless women (the beautiful tall barista who used to be an Olympic swimmer and claims to be a psychologist). 2.3, 2.4, and 2.5 should also be easier to edit once I've finalized the scene order of 2.1. The remaining big challenge then will be 2.6: instead of just following the Shira-Sparks sequence with the "Henry Becket and his psychic-seer mother" scene the way I did in R4, I'm going to cinematically intercut them into a single climactic sequence consisting of as many as five threads, one of them introducing major villain Byron Scofield.

The work has begun at last. And I'm beginning to believe I can finish this chapter before Christmas...

NaNoWriMo 2013: The Heroic Effort to Victory #8

It took a heroic effort to get me to victory in NaNoWriMo 2013, my eighth consecutive victory. I only managed to squeeze out a few thousand words in the first week and a half. After editing Spanner Chapter 1 for so long (fortunately it's finished and formatted so I don't have to do anything more to it), it took me that long to convince my muse to switch from editing Spanner to writing this year's NaNo novel.

On the 18th, I succeeded at last.

Then came what you might consider the early equivalent of Panic Time. Starting that Monday, I had, in order, 6K, 6K, 4K, 10K, 4K, and 6K days before resting that Sunday, leaving me with a word count of 41,000. I slowed down the following week; the 50,000th word came on Thanksgiving, when my family (fortunately, it turns out) did not go to the nearest tribal casino for Thanksgiving dinner.

So what's the next thing I'm going to do to Freefall? After converting the Markdown format original to RTF so I can import it into yWriter5 for editing, I'll let it set for at least a week. Once I return to it, I'll begin the edit process. As I learned from two years editing Spanner, editing is where the real art of writing exists because it's the sculpting of the raw mass of first-draft words into the finished novel.

Speaking of editing, I have two other non-Spanner NaNo novels ready to edit (2007's Bad Company: A Corporate Terror Story and 2009's Dirty Pop) that I can also import into yWriter5. However, my big challenge for the "SpaNoEdMo" in December is Spanner Chapter 2, which right now has bloated to twice its Fourth Revision size and from which I'll have to cull story elements, some of which may have been present from the original draft.

There are some NaNo contestants who now feel (as I read in one post) "a novel-shaped hole in [their] heart". Not me. When I look at all the work I still need to do, especially all the editing, I have to take a deep breath. The sheer amount of editing to be done is daunting. But still I must do it.

The work continues.

NaNoWriMo 2013 Update 1: The Slow, Slow Start

Hey, muse! Yeah, you! Won't you get away from Spanner for a moment and help me write my NaNoWriMo novel? You're getting like Willa's gossip about trendy architect Zaha Hadid in Chapter 4 R5, about how she turned Holy City Arcology's brand new Hall of Heroes into Mount Rushmore-cum-With the Beatles for tyrant superheroes:

Shira: (takes deep breath) Oh my god what the hell is that?

Jennifer: (mouth gaping) That's supposed to be the Hall of Heroes?

Willa: (smiling ironically) Yes, I'm afraid that is indeed Zaha Hadid's temple of hero worship. That blob behind the wall of faces is her grand effusion of love. Drusilla was complaining about how Dick was flirting with Hadid right in front of her, and I'm sure the architect had great fun putting the blush in Dru's pale face. Reliable sources tell me he says she made him feel like a Rock Star, and she felt like she fucked a god. She's gone on to hero-worshipping lesser would-be Napoleons, while he's gone back to hitting on me.

Please, muse, will you at least help me write a first draft for Freefall that sucks, except of course for the clever dialogue that seems to flow from me spontaneously like, well, Zaha Hadid's architectural effusion of fangirlism in Spanner Chapter 4 R5?

Yeah, I'm starting slow again this NaNo. Yes, I'm afraid there will be a Panic Time. I'm having such a hard time just starting that I can't even do my "rapid badwriting" technique because the muse remains monomaniacally obsessed with editing Spanner and throwing me new scenarios faster than I can even write. Looks like I won't have a NaNoFiMo either, since next month's going to be another SpaNoEdMo.

It's way past time to kick the muse into gear. Looks like I'm going to have to use force. (takes out paddle, prepares to tie muse to bed)